Hear them roar

Today, the Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver released “The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything,” a comprehensive study examining a social transformation unfolding right now. For the first time in our nation’s history, one-half of all U.S. workers are women, and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families, also for the first time.

This multifaceted report – including a comprehensive national poll conducted by The Rockefeller Foundation in partnership with TIME Magazine – looks at the changing face and attitudes of the American worker. Economists, sociologists, and other academic experts examine this seismic shift in the workforce and how it is impacting our institutions – business, government, education, faith, and media – as the overwhelming majority of families no longer conform to the traditional paradigm, where men worked outside the home and women were stay-at-home homemakers.

Most Americans view a rising percentage of women in the workforce as a positive thing, the study says. (If only we could increase the percentage in elected office.) Remember the old line about women, fish and bicycles? 40 percent of births in 2007 were to unmarried mothers. (I'm old-fashioned enough to view this with some concern, though I'd be the first to admit that marriage to a sorry man can often be worse than no husband at all.)

Says the report:

The battle of the sexes is over. Now it’s negotiations between the sexes – about work, family, household responsibilities, childcare, and eldercare.

Think that's so?

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